Dantrell Leaves A Legacy Of Peace, For Now At Least

Buried in Space 13, Row 7 of the Washington Memory Gardens Cemetery, Dantrell Davis has regained a kind of anonymity.

The 7-year-old's slaying last Oct. 13 shocked a city that seemed to have long before made its peace with the repeated, violent death of young people.

It was too late, of course, for the boy killed by sniper fire as his mother walked him to school, but Dantrell became one of Chicago's most celebrated children, a symbol of the urban nightmare made real.

In the six months since his death, however, his suburban grave has gone unmarked and unvisited, according to officials of the Homewood cemetery.

No headstone has been ordered, they said, and only a thin layer of grass covers the dirt that covers his boy-sized coffin, laid to rest hard by a gray, wooden fence.

"Tell people it's an unmarked grave of a hero," said Angie Williams, a cemetery employee who works with families to prepare burials.

But at the bustling Cabrini-Green housing development, where Dantrell spent his days, he has left a legacy more profound than any words carved in granite.

It is not just in the brown sign renaming the street between his apartment building and his school, the street where he died, "Dantrell Davis Way."

It is not just in the joy that creeps into his mournful friends' voices when they talk about how they all used to play ball together in a summer like the one that fast approaches.

It is in the fact that, for six soothing months, there has been peace at Cabrini-Green.

Residents, police working at Cabrini and officials of Jenner Elementary, Dantrell's school, all agree: Things actually seem to have changed at a high-rise public housing complex that had gained a reputation as one of the country's most dangerous.

"It's the little things," said Police Sgt. Jim Hanson, who works in the Public Housing North unit headquartered in a Cabrini-Green building. "You can go outside. The families are outside. The mothers have got their babies."

There are streetlights where before there were none, and broken street lamp bulbs are replaced where before they were ignored.

Maintenance workers on Monday dumped load after load of garbage from Dantrell's old building, 502 W. Oak St., into a giant dumpster in the courtyard visible from his fifth-floor door.

That courtyard, along with much of the rest of the Cabrini grounds, once bordered on being a landfill without bulldozers, but it was cleaned up in the wake of Dantrell's death and has stayed clean since, Hanson said.

His legacy is also seen in bigger ways. "In the six months, there's been no homicides at Cabrini," Hanson said. "It's a rarity to hear shots fired, a rarity to hear the call of `a man with a gun.' "

Before Dantrell, two other Jenner pupils-Anthony Felton, 9; and Laquanda Edwards, 13-were shot to death at Cabrini in 1992, victims of alleged gang cross-fire, and there were scores of gun incidents involving adults.

"It's always sad," 13-year-old Runauda McQueen, a friend of all three children, said Monday in the hallway on Dantrell's floor. "When you think about it, you just break up into tears and stuff, 'cause it could have been any one of us."

But since Dantrell's death, he said, Cabrini "feels safer."

Hanson said police just a couple of weeks ago investigated their first shooting in Cabrini since Oct. 13, an event in which one gang member apparently shot another in the stomach.

"The gangs are still around, but we haven't had any serious problems," Hanson said, adding that since January, the number of police at Cabrini was cut back to normal levels. "It's not perfect-who the hell wants to live around here?-but at least it's a lot better."

Many residents credit the welcomed peace to a reputed gang truce, and police acknowledge there may be something to that.

"There's a peace treaty with the boys. They all get along now," said 17-year-old resident Jennifer Love. "It's changed a lot."

The worst that happens now, Love said, is that gang girls might get in a fistfight.

Terry Rutues, director of the Cabrini-based Community Youth Creative Living Experiment, said that involvement in the CHA's Local Advisory Councils has grown, the result of community dissatisfaction that boiled over after Dantrell's death.

"There's a potential for (the LACs) to serve the intended function" of advising and checking the CHA, Rutues said. "For a long time it was sort of dormant."

Two buildings along Cleveland Avenue-including the one where Dantrell's killer lurked-have been closed off entirely.

All the rest, like tonier apartment buildings farther east on Oak Street, are now manned by security guards at the entrances, and the comings and goings of visitors must be accounted for.

Yet for all the contrast with its former self, Cabrini-Green has hardly become a paragon of social planning. The hallways and elevators in 502 W. Oak St., for example, still reek of urine. Cage-like fences still line the halls, and graffiti has already obliterated any evidence of the CHA's reputed repainting of the hallway cinderblock.